Description:Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology publishes reviews, original contributions and commentaries dealing with quantitative empirical and theoretical studies in the analysis of animal behavior on the level of the individual, population and community. A new section, "Methods", considers submissions dealing with statistical procedures and their problems, as well as with problems related to measurement techniques.

Special emphasis is placed on the proximate mechanisms, ultimate functions and evolution of ecological adaptations of behavior.

Among aspects of particular interest are intraspecific behavioral interactions, with special focus on social behavior; interspecific behavioral mechanisms including competition and resource partitioning, mutualism, predator-prey interactions and parasitism; behavioral ecophysiology; orientation in space and time; and relevant evolutionary and functional theory.

The "moving wall" represents the time period between the last issue
available in JSTOR and the most recently published issue of a journal.
Moving walls are generally represented in years. In rare instances, a
publisher has elected to have a "zero" moving wall, so their current
issues are available in JSTOR shortly after publication.
Note: In calculating the moving wall, the current year is not counted.
For example, if the current year is 2008 and a journal has a 5 year
moving wall, articles from the year 2002 are available.

Terms Related to the Moving Wall

Fixed walls: Journals with no new volumes being added to the archive.

Absorbed: Journals that are combined with another title.

Complete: Journals that are no longer published or that have been
combined with another title.

Abstract

Optimal parental investment usually differs depending on the sex of the offspring. However, parents in most organisms cannot discriminate the sex of their young until those young are energetically independent. In a species with physical male-male competition, males are often larger and usually develop sexual ornaments, so male offspring are often more costly to produce. However, Onthophagus dung beetles (Coleoptera; Scarabaeidae) are highly dimorphic in secondary sexual characters, but sexually monomorphic in body size, despite strong male-male competition for mates. We demonstrate that because parents provide all resources required by their offspring before adulthood, O. atripennis exhibits no sexual size dimorphism irrespective of sexual selection pressure favoring sexual dimorphism. By constructing a graphic model with three fitness curves (for sons, daughters, and expected fitness return for parents), we demonstrate that natural selection favors parents that provide both sons and daughters with the optimal amount of investment for sons, which is far greater than that for daughters. This is because the cost of producing small sons, that are unable to compete for mates, is far greater than the cost of producing daughters that are larger than necessary. This theoretical prediction can explain sexual dimorphism without sexual size dimorphism, widely observed in species with crucial parental care such as dung beetles and leaf-rolling beetles, and may provide an insight into the enigmatic relationship between sexual size dimorphism and sexual dimorphism.